1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to a location management method and apparatus, and more particularly to a location management method and apparatus for obtaining, managing, and thereby allowing efficient use of, information about the location of people who go the rounds changing their location every moment.
2. Description of the Related Art
Regarding mobile workers such as sales people, service people, and delivery people who are on the road changing their location every moment, it is often necessary to know, record, and log their location in order to make urgent inquiries or emergency contacts, predict arrival times, or prepare daily reports. There are not a few cases in which it is desired to know the exact location of a customer calling from the road. The present invention provides a useful location management measures in such cases.
Conventionally, most companies do not systematically manage the activities of field staff such as customer service (CS) personnel who perform on-site service in response to user complaints, sales personnel who advertise and sell products, and delivery personnel who deliver products. The following is a typical example of operations management for customer service (CS) personnel, sales personnel, and delivery personnel in a building material manufacturer.
[1] Example of operations management for customer service (CS) personnel:
(1) The sales department or quality control department of a company receives a customer's complaint about a product. (2) The department assesses the state of quality control and calls the CS person who is likely to be the nearest to the building site of the customer on a portable telephone (or mobile telephone) based on an operations schedule of CS people. (3) The department checks the current location of the called CS person by phone. (4) The department judges whether the CS person can go to the site of the customer who made the complaint. If he/she can, the department instructs him/her to do so. (5) The travel to the customer's site is left up to the CS person, who goes to the site, keeping in touch with the sales depatment. (6) The CS person prepares a daily report at the end of the day. If the CS person is on a business trip, he/she faxes the daily report to the quality control department from a hotel. It is often the case that a CS person submits daily reports for the past week or the like all at one time when he/she goes to the office.
[2] Example of operations management for sales personnel:
(1) The sales department of a company receives a request from a customer to send samples of building material urgently. (2) The department informs a sales representative on the go about the matter by phone. (3) If the sales representative can go to the customer's site, he/she is asked to take samples. If he/she cannot, the samples will be delivered to the customer later. (4) When coming back to the office from a day's outside work, the sales representative prepares and submit a daily report. Depending on the location, it will take some days for the sales representative to return to the office. In that case, the daily report will be submitted later.
[3] Example of operations management for delivery personnel:
(1) For delivery of ordered goods to a building site, the customer is asked to fax the address and a map of the new building. (2) The sales department or a product center registers the object by entering its address in a host computer. (3) The map is faxed further to the physical distribution department to confirm the site address. (4) The host computer has registered average arrival time in a customer master of each customer to answer inquiries about delivery time. (5) After a delivery truck leaves the office, the company loses track of it.
The examples of operations management for customer service (CS) personnel, sales personnel, and delivery personnel described above have the following problems.
[1] Problems in relation to customer service (CS) personnel:
(1) The quality control department does not know the current location of CS personnel. There is often no operations schedule. Even if there is, the operations schedule is not always followed. (2) The quality control department does not keep track of CS personnel's daily activities. (3) It is troublesome to describe a day's activities of a CS person in detail in a daily report. (4) There is no point in receiving a week's daily reports all at one time. There may be matters that require immediate attention. (5) Daily reports sometimes do not reach the quality control department.
[2] Problems in relation to sales personnel:
(1) Since the current locations of sales people are unknown, there is no way to know who is nearest to a customer who has an urgent business matter. Consequently, the customer will be inconvenienced by a delay in response. (2) Currently, most of daily reports do not contain temporal information. Consequently, there is no way to know how a sales person moved around during a given day, how many minutes he/she spent visiting each customer, and whether there were wasteful movements or actions. (3) In the case of on-site delivery, a site address is essential and will take some time and labor to enter. If a map is transmitted by fax, it may turn out to be unreadable, resulting in a delayed delivery. This in turn may delay the field work, incurring extra expenses.
[3] Problems in relation to delivery personnel:
(1) Delivery time varies with the number of deliveries to be made on that day, delivery route, road conditions, and various other factors. In most cases, delivery time is estimated based on the average of past data and is prone to error. However, the customer such as a construction contractor makes arrangements for carpenters and vehicles. Therefore, if goods are not delivered on time, the arrangements may incur waste and there may be a delay in construction time. The delayed construction time will involve a penalty and thus cause inconvenience to the customer. (2) If arrival is delayed due to a truck accident or breakdown during transportation, it may sometimes be necessary to arrange for another truck and reload the goods. However, it may take time to find the current location of the delivery truck and send the replacement truck. (3) There is no way of knowing when goods were actually delivered to customers. Besides, it is not possible to tell whether the delivery routes (roads) used are the shortest routes because they are left up to truck drivers.